MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 77

"And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,

To mark the full-fraught man and best indued

With some suspicion."

--Henry V.

The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond

that he should be away until the evening. Of late she had

never gone beyond her own house and garden, except to church,

and once to see her papa, to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away,

you will help us to move, will you not, papa? I suppose we shall

have very little money. I am sure I hope some one will help us."

And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I don't mind a hundred or two.

I can see the end of that." With these exceptions she had sat

at home in languid melancholy and suspense, fixing her mind on

Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and interest,

and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make immediate

arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London, till she

felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the going,

without at all seeing how. This way of establishing sequences is

too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.

And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest

shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced

is often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing

except the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect,

rids us of doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive. That was

the process going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects

around her with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--

or sat down to the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting,

yet lingering on the music stool with her white fingers suspended

on the wooden front, and looking before her in dreamy ennui.

Her melancholy had become so marked that Lydgate felt a strange

timidity before it, as a perpetual silent reproach, and the strong man,

mastered by his keen sensibilities towards this fair fragile creature

whose life he seemed somehow to have bruised, shrank from her look,

and sometimes started at her approach, fear of her and fear for her

rushing in only the more forcibly after it had been momentarily expelled

by exasperation.

But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--

where she sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--

equipped for a walk in the town. She had a letter to post--a letter